


Black

by eluna



Series: Vanishing 'Verse [3]
Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Instability, Post-Canon, Post-Mockingjay, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23997034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: “Don’t you—insult her! She was…” He gropes around for a word to describe Moxie—how she was so caring, worried so much about hurting other people’s feelings, tried so hard to be likable; how she’d call to a fight anybody who dared bully him; how he’d see the gouge marks on her thighs while they were having sex and know that she put them there because she had to punish someone for making her so desperately unhappy, whether it was herself or him he was never really sure—but he can’t find one, so instead he just says, “She was my girlfriend.”Haymitch hoots at him. “No shit.”“She was my girlfriend, and I loved her. She wouldn’t want—want me to be happy without her, so now what do I do?”“You have another drink,” says Haymitch, grabbing Briar’s glass.(Or: Katniss and Peeta's son faces the new pain of his girlfriend's suicide and the old pain of his father's abuse.)
Relationships: Haymitch Abernathy & Katniss & Peeta's Son, Katniss & Peeta's Son & Peeta Mellark, Katniss & Peeta's Son/Original Female Character(s), Katniss Everdeen & Katniss & Peeta's Son, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Series: Vanishing 'Verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1725196
Comments: 21
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure how many chapters I'm doing this time, or exactly where I'm going with this! Please comment or leave kudos if you liked <3 Thanks Elricsister for suggesting I write about Briar!

Briar is at home with Rosy when his girlfriend’s father arrives with the news. “I’m afraid I—I have some very bad news,” says Mr. Littlehorn, sounding all choked up, his face pallid.

Briar frowns. “Is everything okay? Did something happen to Moxie?”

“She’s… we found her body in the bathtub this morning, Briar. She’s gone.”

And just like that, the world burns. Briar thinks he might throw up. He’s dizzy, suddenly, and his face feels like it’s on fire, and his stomach has dropped about three stories below ground level. “Moxie can’t be—she can’t—not _Moxie_.”

But even as he says it, he finds himself replaying their last conversations, remembering the look on her face, so glum. He thinks about what she said last week about the sun losing its light and grey rainbows, about angry wasps buzzing in her head.

He stumbles backward and does throw up, then, all over his own feet, and it soaks through his socks, but Briar doesn’t care. Nothing matters without Moxie.

Something is rising inside Briar’s chest, and he holds it down the best he can to ask, “What—? How did she…? Did she…?” But he can’t bring himself to say his theory.

“She, um, she cut her neck. Her carotid artery. The healer says it would have been quick—she’d have lost consciousness after just a few seconds.”

It was quick. Somehow, that doesn’t help matters. Moxie is _gone_. “Excuse me,” he says, the thing in his chest swelling up, and he darts up the stairs, flings open his bedroom door, and launches himself onto the bed, his face stuffed in the pillows.

He’s just in time. He cries so hard that he actually screams out those first few breaths, unable to get himself under control, and even when the involuntary screaming stops, the shuddering sobs continue for a long, long time. He hears Rosy talking to Mr. Littlehorn downstairs, and then she’s in his room, planting herself next to him on the mattress and rubbing a hand on his back. “I’m so sorry, Briar,” she tells him, but she sounds like she knows it’s not going to help.

There are still two months left before Briar graduates, but Rosy doesn’t say anything when Briar stays home from school for one day, then two. Then it’s the weekend, and he can’t remember the last time he got out of bed for anything other than to go to the bathroom. It hurts to walk. It hurts to _breathe_. Rosy brings up all his meals, but he can barely eat. All he can do is lie facing the wall, napping whenever he can, counting down the minutes until it’s time to fall asleep.

Briar doesn’t want to be awake. He doesn’t want to do or be anything at all.

On Sunday, when Rosy comes up with a bowl of cereal for breakfast, she doesn’t just leave it in the doorway. She comes and sits next to him again. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, but this isn’t good for you. Moxie wouldn’t want this.”

“Are you kidding?” scoffs Briar. It’s the first time he’s spoken in a couple of days, and his voice sounds phlegmmy and disused. “Moxie would hate the idea of leaving me here to be happy without her. I can hardly believe she didn’t come here to tell me it was my fault before doing it.”

Rosy keeps her voice very even, despite what Briar is sure are a million accusations flying around her mind. “That would have been very wrong of her,” she says, and Briar scoffs again. “Did you—? I mean, I guess this means you knew she was suffering from depression.”

“She had weekly phone appointments with some fancy therapist in District 13.”

“Dr. Aurelius?”

“No, another one. Some woman. Her dad set her up. Her house didn’t have a phone, so she used to go to the local healer after school every Wednesday and borrow theirs for it. It was a Wednesday night when she killed herself,” he adds abruptly. His voice sounds monotone, empty. “I said goodbye at the end of the school day, before her appointment, and she told me she’d see me tomorrow. Why did she do that? Why would she say that and then…?”

“I think she must have meant it at the time,” says Rosy. “I think she must not have planned it very far in advance.”

“She always said that was how she was going to do it, if she did—cutting her carotid artery. She had it planned down to which kitchen knife she was going to use and doing it in the bathtub so there wouldn’t be a mess and which of her favorite books she was going to read a chapter out of before she did it. She had it planned _months_ in advance. The problem was, she’d change her mind at light speed. One minute, she was fine, and the next, she was telling me she wanted to die. One minute, she’s asking to borrow my economics notes to study for the exam on Friday, and the next…”

Rosy rubs him on the shoulder. “We don’t have to talk about this now, if you don’t want. We don’t have to talk about it _ever_ , if you don’t want.”

It’s almost like Briar doesn’t even hear her. “When she was happy, she tried _so_ hard to make _me_ happy. But when she was miserable, I had to be miserable, too. But it wasn’t her fault. I don’t—didn’t—blame her. The depression made her feel all alone, and she just didn’t want to be left behind. It wasn’t her fault,” he finishes in a whisper.

“Come downstairs,” says Rosy.

So Briar comes downstairs. Rosy turns the TV on to something stupid, and Briar half listens to it and half just sits there staring, unseeing, at the picture. At dinnertime, Rosy says, “What do you want?” and Briar says back, “I’m not hungry.”

“You’ve barely eaten in days. I know because I make your meals and wash your dishes, and I’ve had to scrape an alarming amount of food off all your plates. Mom would be horrified. You have to eat something, so tell me what I’m making.”

“I don’t know, whatever you want,” says Briar.

Rosy sighs. “Okay. I’ll make stew, and you can have as much as you can get down. But tomorrow night, you have to make an effort. It’s family night, remember?”

Family night. Of course Briar remembers. It’s his least favorite time of the week, because it’s the one time he can’t avoid being in the same room as Dad, and just because Dad isn’t—hurting him—anymore doesn’t mean that Briar’s pulse doesn’t pick up and sweat glands all start firing whenever Dad is there.

It helps a little that Ash and his parents come with Daphne, because Mom and Dad are usually down at one end of the table talking to Mr. and Mrs. Wheatshire, and that leaves Briar to chat with Rosy and Ash as they try to coax Daphne into eating a good supper. Briar never really knows what exactly he’s supposed to be saying to Daphne, who’s too young to carry on a real conversation yet, but he listens as her parents sweet-talk her, at least, and laughs at all the funny faces she makes as she’s eating.

But being around Dad just does, and probably always will, make Briar feel antsy. He hates Dad. He _hates_ him. Not that Briar will ever admit that out loud.

“I can’t do it this time. I just can’t,” Briar tells Rosy now. “Can’t I just stay upstairs until Mom and Dad are gone?”

“You need to rejoin civilization sometime,” says Rosy. “You know that, right? The alternative is wasting away, and I don’t care how vindictive of a bitch Moxie was—”

“ _Don’t talk about her like—!_ ”

“—I’m not going to let you do that to yourself. I won’t allow it,” she says firmly.

“Rosy, I can’t do family night. Not now. Not like this. I’ll eat whatever you want me to eat, just—don’t make me go. Please.”

Rosy gives him an appraising look. “Okay,” she says. “You can stay in your room and eat your serving afterward. But don’t think this means that I’m going to let you bury yourself in grief and not live your life. Now get in here and help me peel these potatoes.”

Of course, there’s a third option that Rosy’s not seeing: Briar could always kill himself and join Moxie wherever she is now. He’s never considered suicide before—not seriously, anyway—but faced with a world without Moxie, Briar almost feels like maybe she’s the one who had the right idea about things.

When family night arrives, listening to Ash and Daphne arrive and laugh with Rosy downstairs makes Briar feel sick inside. Moxie is _dead_ , and there are people who _knew_ her who are having fun like she’s not gone, like the world isn’t a worse place for want of her, and—

He lunges down the stairs two at a time and tries to get away with a brief nod as he shoulders past Ash and Rosy, but Rosy doesn’t let him get off that easy. “Whoa, hey, where are you going?”

“Uncle Haymitch’s,” he says flatly.

“Oh. All right. Don’t be out too late, all right? It is a school night.”

“Yeah. Bye, Ash.”

He allows Rosy to give him a quick hug, and then he’s out the door and bounding across the street to Haymitch’s house. Haymitch is—conscious, but pretty wasted. “’Eyy, buddy!”

“Hey, Uncle Haymitch.”

Haymitch slams down the bottle he’s holding, sways in place, and then claps Briar on the shoulder unsteadily. “I was so sorry,” he says, “to hear about your girlfriend.”

“You’re sorry. Rosy’s sorry. Everyone’s sorry.”

“How long were you with her?” asks Haymitch, sitting down gingerly.

“A year and five months,” says Briar. “A year and five months, and I never even invited her to family night.”

Haymitch snorts. “I’ve known your parents since they were teenagers, boy, and I’ve _never_ been invited to family night. It’s a—selective crowd. Don’t feel too bad.”

“You’ve never been invited to family night because Mom and Dad don’t want to subject the Wheatshires to you.”

“Oh! So it only takes the suicide of his girlfriend for him to become feisty! I didn’t know you had it in you, old boy.”

“Oh, shut up,” says Briar, even though Haymitch is kind of right. Nothing seems to matter enough anymore for Briar to go to the effort of censoring himself to protect anybody’s feelings.

“You shut up. You want a drink? It helps.”

“You would know,” mutters Briar, and then he says, “Okay.”

And that’s how Briar finds himself working his way steadily to the bottom of a whiskey bottle with Haymitch. Briar has never been drunk before, and he’s not really sure whether what Haymitch is giving him are shots or doubles or what, though Haymitch himself might not even be sure—he’s already pretty trashed, himself, and keeps sloshing alcohol into Briar’s glass until declaring that it’s “enough” for him to down. The whiskey doesn’t fizz like beer does, but the first couple drinks burn after he swallows them.

He feels—hot. In his chest, kind of? Like, there’s definitely some kind of hot sensation going on, but it’s localized. Two drinks in, he feels kind of giddy and giggly—the lightest he’s felt since before Moxie—and Haymitch pours him a larger third, which goes down easier. “I’m—this is—you know what you’re talking about, with this,” Briar slurs, and Haymitch beams at him and claps him on the shoulder.

The fourth drink goes down easy, too, and even if it shouldn’t, it catches him off guard when he starts crying. “She’s _gone_ , Uncle Haymitch,” he sobs. The pleasantly warm feeling has grown prickly and hot as it spreads to his face and limbs. “She’s gone, and they were _laughing_! They were all _happy_! And Moxie told me I don’t _get_ to be happy if she’s not, and now—”

“She told you that?” says Haymitch. “That’s fucked up, kiddo.”

“Don’t you—insult her! She was…” He gropes around for a word to describe Moxie—how she was so caring, worried so much about hurting other people’s feelings, tried so hard to be likable; how she’d call to a fight anybody who dared bully him; how he’d see the gouge marks on her thighs while they were having sex and know that she put them there because she had to punish _someone_ for making her so desperately unhappy, whether it was herself or him he was never really sure—but he can’t find one, so instead he just says, “She was my girlfriend.”

Haymitch _hoots_ at him. “No shit.”

“She was my girlfriend, and I loved her. She wouldn’t want—want me to be happy without her, so _now_ what do I do?”

“You have another drink,” says Haymitch, grabbing Briar’s glass. The bottle wavers in midair as he struggles to pour out another however-much for Briar to drink, and Haymitch’s hand slips, and he ends up doling out at least twice as much whiskey as he did on the last drink. “Eh,” says Haymitch, cocking his head to the side and checking out his handiwork, and then he hands the glass over to Briar.

“Life is fucked up. Good people die,” says Haymitch sagely as Briar downs his fifth drink. “Best get used to it now, before they can hurt you again.”

“I don’t want to get used to it,” Briar says slowly. “I don’t want to get used to a world without her.” The words feel wobbly as they come out of his mouth.

“Then what the hell did you come here for, huh? What are you drinking for if not—if not so you can forget?”

There’s an acidic burn in the back of his throat, and that’s when he notices the nausea, smacking into him hard and fast. “Shit. _Shit_ , I’m going to… I’m going to…”

“Not on the couch,” says Haymitch, and Briar bends over about three seconds before he pukes all over Haymitch’s hardwood floor.

Haymitch grins, like it’s funny or something. “And it’s going to be _your_ job to clean that up in the morning.”

The morning—! Rosy’s expecting him to go back to school tomorrow, but all Briar can think about is how badly he wishes he could black out and not hurt anymore, not because of Moxie and not because of Dad. “Will you—will you cover for me?” he slurs out.

Barking out a laugh, Haymitch replies, “Even if I don’t tell her, Rosy will figure you out like _that_.”

But Briar isn’t thinking about Rosy. He’s thinking about Dad, his hitting hand and his whip-tongue, and suddenly Briar is eight years old again and Dad is screaming how he’s a coward who won’t own his own fuck-ups, and nobody could love him, not his friends and no girls and certainly not Dad, and does he want Dad to send him to the Games? Offer him up as tribute so his snivelling ass can get murdered at the sound of the gong if he doesn’t learn to grow up and act like a man? Because _Dad_ had to grow the hell up when _he_ was Briar’s age, when Grandma Mellark would hold him down and _beat_ him twice a day for good measure, and Dad didn’t survive his mother, two arenas, a hijacking, and a revolution just to get a pussy for a son who _doesn’t fight back_ —

“I hate him,” Briar realizes he’s sobbing over and over. “I hate him.”

“You hate who, kiddo?”

It’s a long night.

When he wakes up, he’s on the couch. There’s a positively earsplitting pain in his head, and he thinks he might throw up again, though he manages to just barely restrain himself for the moment. Briar looks over to where he barfed last night and—seeing that Haymitch, for all his talk, has cleaned up the mess—feels a surge of affection for his uncle.

“I called you in at school,” calls Haymitch, noticing that Briar is up. “Technically, I don’t think I _can_ , as I’m not one of your guardians, but I think the secretary I talked to knew that the girl was your girlfriend. Nobody’s really expecting you to go back right away.”

“Thanks,” Briar croaks.

“I called your sister, too,” he adds. Briar is already so flushed and nauseous that it can’t really get any higher, but he does feel a tingling in his fingers and toes that tells him his body is paying attention and running scared. “Told her what happened. You’re going to be in for a hell of a time when you go home, but she said you can stay here until your hangover wears off.”

“I’m never drinking again.”

“Yeah, I told myself that, too, once,” says Haymitch. “Drink some water. Don’t try and eat anything.”

The one advantage to his drinking binge is that Briar is now so hungover, his headache and nausea are distracting him from the dully-throbbing memory of Moxie’s death. It’s the first time he’s been able to get his mind somewhat off of her since her father showed up on his doorstep. Even so, the world feels empty and brittle and wasted, and Briar—doesn’t really want to be in it, to be honest.

The day drags on until Briar finally feels human enough to go back home. “I’ll come back soon,” he promises Haymitch, even though Rosy will probably try and put a stop to that.

She’s gone when he gets there—probably still at Ash’s visiting him and Daphne—so Briar goes up to his room and stares at the wall some more. What did he used to _do_ with all of his free time? Go hunting like Mom taught him, or read, or hang out with Moxie. Now, he only wants to do one thing, and it’s the one he can’t do, not anymore. Not ever.

Rosy yells at him for—Briar doesn’t know how long. Before, he might have timed it, just to see, just to be able to say, but now, tracking the time seems pointless. At least Rosy doesn’t call him a wimp or a pussy or a coward like Dad would have. Instead, she just keeps telling him that he’s worth too much to throw his life away over a girl, no matter what happened to her or how much he loves her.

Finally, when it’s over, Rosy lowers her voice and drops down onto the mattress next to Briar. “Are you at least hearing what I’m saying? Because you look like you’re somewhere else.”

He is. He’s with Moxie, kissing her for the first time, clumsily biting her lip and pressing his thumb against the one patch of bare skin on her waist that he dared touch. “I hear you,” he says, closing the memory like a book.

“Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”

That she’s gone. That she’s gone and she’s _never_ coming back. “I just keep remembering…”

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing, now. Never mind.”

He goes back to school the next day. By now, he’s behind in all of his classes, and he can’t really focus in any of his classes, doodling in the margins of his notebooks and zoning out for minutes at a time. Last Friday, he missed an exam in English class, and he stays after the school day is over to make it up. Flunks it, probably.

“I know you’re going through hell right now. I _know_ ,” Rosy says to him at the end of the school week, after she’s asked how classes are going and he’s been up front about it. “So you have—choices, I guess. You can find a way to pull it together and finish out the year with your graduating class. You can keep going like you’re going and fail the semester and have to retake it, or drop out, even. Or you can—ask for help.”

“Help?”

“I don’t think anyone would fault you for wanting to take a few months off and make up your last two months of school over the summer, once you’ve had some time to—well—adjust—and grieve. If you ask your teachers, they’ll probably let you.”

“Can you do it?” asks Briar, and his voice sounds pitiful and weak. “I can’t… I just can’t… it’s not in me.”

Rosy shoots him a sympathetic look. “I’ll call the school on Monday,” she promises. “But, Briar, you’ve got to stop moping around and start—”

“Living my life, yeah, I know. Listen—I’ll go to family night this weekend,” Briar says, and Rosy looks confused but pleased, “but only if you invite Uncle Haymitch, too.”

“Uncle Haymitch? But…”

“I think he’s lonely, Rosy. I think he’s really, really lonely, and I think being cooped up in his house alone with his drinking is just as bad for him as you thought it was for me.”

Rosy purses her lips, and Briar can just _tell_ that she doesn’t approve of having Haymitch over after he introduced Briar to the world of binge drinking. “I’ll invite him,” she says, “but he’s only allowed to come if he hasn’t been drinking, and I’ll only ask him _if_ you do everything I say tomorrow. Now get in here and help me cook dinner.”

Doing everything Rosy says tomorrow, as it turns out, entails cooking and eating breakfast, hunting, picking fruit, drawing, cooking and eating dinner, and paying a visit to Mom and Dad. He’s with her through most of the day—even through the two excruciatingly painful hours worth of art lessons; unlike Rosy, Briar is no artist—but when she tries to get him to go to Mom and Dad’s after dinner, he balks. “Why would you—? You know how Dad… I don’t understand. Why are you doing this?”

“Because you need as many people on your side as you can find right now, and for all their faults, they want to be there for you. Because you deserve to have the kind of parents you can lean on for this stuff.”

“If you think I would ever, _ever_ lean on Dad for this—”

“So then talk to Mom. I’ll keep Dad distracted. You don’t even have to talk to her about Moxie—just do _something_ with her. Okay?”

“I don’t like this,” says Briar flatly.

Rosy smiles grimly. “Do you want me to invite Haymitch over tomorrow or not?”

So they troupe over to Mom and Dad’s house, Briar’s stomach tying itself into knots. Dad answers Rosy’s knock at the door, and he breaks out into a delighted smile. “Come on in,” he says, ushering them inside. He gives Rosy a big hug, then Briar, who pats Dad on the back a couple of times but otherwise just stands there frozen until it’s over.

“Let’s go up to your studio,” says Rosy. “Where’s Mom?”

Mom, it turns out, is up in her room with what Briar and Rosy call her “people book”—a handwritten journal full of memories of loved ones who have passed away. Briar’s got the thing practically memorized after seeing the same pages over and over all throughout his life, but he nestles into the mattress next to her and reads over her shoulder anyway. Finnick, Madge, Mitchell—the rebel Dad killed when he was out of his mind. Briar always wondered why Dad deigned to include him, and when he asked once, Dad just said, “He was a good man, and he deserves to be honored, even if his death is a painful memory. Never block out a memory just because it reflects badly on you. We owe people better than that.”

Now, Briar kind of wonders how much Dad was talking about himself there.

“Can we add Moxie to the book?” Briar hears himself ask before he’s even aware he was going to.

Mom gives him a sad look—sadder than usual, anyway. “Of course, Briar. What do you want to say about her?”

“She was beautiful,” says Briar. “She was sad and then happy and then sad again, back and forth, every day. She worried about doing the wrong thing around people, but I don’t know if it was because she wanted to be kind or because she wanted to be liked—to not be rejected. She said it was because, when she made mistakes, she had to live with them in her head, and she didn’t want to live like that. She was my biggest defender except when she was tearing me down. She learned martial arts so that she could beat up bullies for me. She said it wasn’t my fault she was unhappy, but that if she couldn’t be happy, then I couldn’t, either. She told me she wanted to die at least twice a week, and I never took her seriously because she never tried anything. Sometimes she scratched herself until she bled while I was in the room just to get me to pay attention to her. I tried to break up with her once, and she told me if she died, it would be because she tried to live without me and failed. She told me she was too broken to be good and that I’d be better off without her, but that she was too selfish to leave me. She cried a lot. When she found out I cheated on her, she called me an abuser and said I deserved to suffer the way I made _her_ suffer, and that _nobody_ suffered like she did, and that she wished I hated myself half as much as she loved me. She hated herself because she knew what she could be like and because she never changed. She told me she loved me. And I believe her. That’s the most important part. She meant all of it when she said it, and I believe her.”

Numbly, he gives the book back to Mom. “Briar,” she says, but he doesn’t listen to whatever comes next. He bounds down the stairs and out of the house and all the way out of Victors’ Village.

Can you call someone abusive when they weren’t doing it on purpose? He rolls the word “abuser” around his mouth, but it feels like slander—like he’s twisting Moxie’s words out of context. She could be awful, and because of that he tried to break up with her, and then had sex with Sarrel Greenscape and told Moxie about it to try to make her hate him—but he never wanted her dead, and _she_ never wanted to hurt him. No: that wasn’t right. When she was in a rage, or in a pit, she tried to hurt him plenty of times. But she always hated herself for it—really, truly loathed herself—and was always trying to do better, even though she usually failed.

Thinking just those words to himself, it doesn’t sound like Moxie had an excuse for her behavior. But Moxie—when she was herself, when she was okay, she didn’t make excuses. It was like she was two different people, and one of them was always sabotaging the other. He loved the part of Moxie that was healthy, and the part of her that wasn’t—well, he still didn’t want her in pain.

And ultimately, Moxie’s motives were never about causing pain: her biggest motivation in life was the avoidance of the pain she was almost always in, if not because of her circumstances then because of the horrors of her own mind. But—that’s not entirely fair of Briar to say, either. There were plenty of times, too many to count, when Moxie did something kind or self-sacrificing to care for Briar. When he confided in her about his dad, she never told a soul a word of what he’d said, but listened and told Briar he was a good person who deserved a better father, said that what Dad had done was abuse and Briar deserved a life free of abuse. Free of _her_ , too, she admitted with shame in her eyes. When he told her he didn’t like the way she always called things “retarded,” she stopped, and he never heard her say it again. _Anytime_ that he said he liked something, she remembered it, and anytime that he said he didn’t, she never repeated it. And whenever _he_ cried or felt sad, she stayed with him until it passed, even though he couldn’t do the same for her. Briar lived a quiet life, and Moxie didn’t have a lot of opportunities to make grand gestures, but she always did what she could to make him happy.

Or did she only do those things because she was trying to manipulate Briar into staying, because she knew that being who she was was driving him to want to leave? The instant Briar thinks it, he feels sick—not because of the implications of the thought, but because he _knew_ Moxie—knew her well enough to know that that wasn’t true. She herself tried to break up with Briar, oh, at least half a dozen times, because she said she wanted a better life for him. She always came back a few days later, saying she couldn’t help herself and crying—but why would she even have tried, if she was trying to rope him in?

When he stops walking, he finds himself in the woods. He didn’t bring his bow or anything to hunt with, but he stoops to collect dandelions, giving himself up to the task and allowing it to numb his mind for a while, before he turns around and heads home.

Rosy is home when he gets there. She’s sitting at the base of the steps leading upstairs, and when he walks into the house, she stands, leaning against the banister.

“I brought dandelions,” he says unnecessarily.

“Mom told me and Dad what you said,” says Rosy.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” says Briar, flushing.

But Rosy is blocking his path up the stairs to his room. “Why didn’t you tell anyone what you were going through with her?”

“Did _you_ tell anyone what _you_ were going through with Dad?”

She bows her head. “Only Uncle Haymitch.”

“Then you understand,” he says. “She wasn’t a bad person, and I didn’t want to make people hate her or turn them against her.”

“I’m not saying she was a bad person,” Rosy argues, “but Briar, why did you love her? Why did you allow her to treat you that way?”

“She wasn’t always like that, and I didn’t want to abandon her, and maybe the voice in my head that sounds like Dad told me that she was the most I deserved.” It’s a horrible thing to say, and especially about a dead girl—that her worth is less than other people’s. But it’s not that he thinks Moxie is worth less. Maybe it’s about her actions instead of her identity—that she abused him without necessarily being an abuser.

That definition feels a little fairer in his head. Abuse without an abuser.

“Briar, I really think you need to work out your issues with Dad. He’s just a person—he doesn’t get to dictate your worth. Maybe if you worked through that a little better—”

“I can’t just share a good cry with him and call us even,” says Briar in a quiet voice. “Maybe you can, but I can’t.”

“Do you really think that’s what I’ve done—that I’ve called me and Dad even?” Rosy seems to grapple for words for a few long moments while Briar shifts the dandelions from one hand to the other. “Forgiveness isn’t about writing off what other people do as _okay_. It’s about understanding that they’re just another person and giving yourself permission not to let what they did define you.”

“Deep,” says Briar, frowning.

“This isn’t over.”

“Okay.”

Rosy sighs. “I called Uncle Haymitch. He said he’ll be here and sober for dinner tomorrow. Go put those in the fridge and then get some sleep.” Briar has ducked into the kitchen and emerged and is heading up the stairs when Rosy calls, “And Briar?”

“Yeah?”

“It was kind of you to try to take care of Moxie like you did. But—your willingness to let your first significant person after your family walk all over you scares me. It scares me more than anything Dad ever did could scare me.”

Briar doesn’t answer. He climbs the rest of the stairs, collapses into bed, and falls asleep within minutes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would guess there will be one more chapter after this one? I'm not sure what's going to go in it, though. So if you have anything you want to see, let me know!

Rosy sits Briar down on Sunday morning and lays out some ground rules. She’ll talk to his teachers about giving him some time off and letting him make up his coursework to graduate over the summer, she says, but she has conditions. He can’t just lie in bed doing nothing all day, for one: he has to help her cook and clean and hunt every day, and in his downtime, she expects him to take up actual hobbies, like reading (an old standby) and writing (a new suggestion). He has to spend time with other people every day. Every week, he has to either talk or write about Moxie to try to consciously process his grief. Finally—and this is the point they fight about—he has to help Dad with the bakery.

“No. Rosy, I _can’t_.”

“I know that’s what you think,” she says, and Briar gapes at her. Does she _really_ not understand? “But this thing between you and Dad and your relationship with Moxie—I think they’re obviously interrelated. I think that, as long as you’re still scared of Dad, you’re going to let anyone who tries to abuse you get away with it, and I think you need to learn to see him as just another person, not somebody who gets to dictate how bad of a person you are. If he pulls any shit—any at all—you tell me. But he won’t. He hasn’t for years; you know that.”

“But it’s _Dad_. You _know_ how I feel about—”

“Exactly, and that’s exactly why I think you need this. Would you rather drop out? Or repeat a year? I didn’t think so. I’ll call him and set it up this afternoon—starting tomorrow, you can go over there every afternoon when I’m with Daphne and Ash.”

True to her word, Rosy invites Uncle Haymitch to family night, and he shows up looking grouchy but sober, the smell of alcohol gone from his breath. Daphne thinks it’s a real treat to get to see him—Rosy doesn’t bring her to his house often—and insists on sitting in between him and Rosy at Rosy’s big circular table. Ash is on Rosy’s other side, then his parents, then Mom and Dad, leaving Briar wedged in between Haymitch and Dad. Even focusing intently on what Haymitch and Rosy and Ash have to say, Briar’s hackles are up and his pulse is pounding in his veins throughout the whole dinner. ****

They’ve all finished eating and are sitting around the table sipping tea when Moxie, inevitably, comes up. “I was so sorry to hear about your girlfriend, Briar,” Mrs. Wheatshire drawls, offering him a sad sort of smile. “We heard her funeral was very well-attended.”

“Yes,” Briar mumbles, looking down. He himself didn’t go to the funeral—they held it the Saturday after her death, when he was still lying around the house, unable to move or carry on a conversation or pay attention to anything but his own head. Was that how Moxie felt all the time—trapped in her own mind, struggling to get back onto other people’s plane and failing?

There’s a brief, awkward pause, and then Ash says, “We’re all here for you if you ever want to talk or anything.”

“Thanks, man,” he says, fully intending never to take Ash up on the offer.

Dad reaches over and squeezes Briar’s knee, and he thinks his heart is going to break free of his chest and leap out onto the table, it’s thudding so hard. _How_ is he supposed to bake with Dad _every_ afternoon from now on?

Seeming to sense that Briar is uncomfortable, Haymitch says, “Has the Wheatshire family ever heard the story of how Peeta here botched the vows at his and Katniss’s wedding?”

“Oh, Haymitch, I don’t think—” Mom starts to say, but Haymitch launches into the story anyway. There’s not much to tell—they didn’t write their own vows or anything; Dad just got nervous and tripped over his words a bit as he repeated the traditional vows—but Haymitch plays it up for effect, says that the nerves overcame Mom until she was cackling like a hyena and they had to pause the ceremony for a few minutes. Haymitch says that was the happiest he’s ever seen Mom.

Briar tries to picture Mom happy—really, truly happy—and finds that he can’t do it. Dad is _blushing_ , and Daphne claps with delight.

Mr. and Mrs. Wheatshire are the first to leave, followed shortly thereafter by Ash and Daphne, and eventually by Mom and Dad. They both give Rosy and Briar tight hugs, and Briar holds his breath and counts until it’s over.

He’s up half the night dreading starting his tenure at the bakery tomorrow. He should never have agreed to this, should have just repeated the semester a year from now, or else sucked it up and found a way to pass all his classes on time. This is going to be a _disaster_.

He wishes Moxie were here so that he could tell her about working for Dad and how anxious the anticipation is making him. She always knew he right thing to say to build up Briar’s confidence and make him feel like he could do the things he was so afraid to do. Said that Briar deserved so much better and she wanted to be the one to show him what that looked like.

Briar tries to picture what she would tell him if she were here, but he can’t, because she’s not. If she were, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.

 _Why_ did Moxie have to kill herself? She’d been talking with that therapist and, from what Briar could see, getting better—why couldn’t she have hung on?

After finally drifting off around four in the morning, Briar feels like death when Rosy jerks him awake at eight o’clock. “Why are you still in bed? You went up here at, like, nine last night.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” says Briar blearily, scraping crust out of his eyes. “Time to cook?”

“And then eat, and then hunt. Then you’re due at Dad’s while I go see Daphne with Mom.”

“ _Mom’s_ going with you? You couldn’t have let her stay in the house with us?”

“If you’re going in, you’re going _all_ in,” Rosy says simply. “Get dressed and brush your teeth. I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

He’s a little irate about Rosy micromanaging him these days, but to be fair, it’s not like he’s taking care of himself at all when she doesn’t. Buttoning up a flannel and zipping his slacks, Briar paces around the top story as he brushes his teeth, and then rinses and leaps downstairs.

Briar feels like the hours are slipping right through his fingers, the separation between him and his afternoon baking at Dad’s house disappearing. It quickly becomes clear in the woods that his hands are going to be shaking too hard to aim his arrows at anything, so Rosy lets him go down by the lake and write in his new journal while she tries to catch some game on her own. Mom and Dad can afford to go shopping for the whole family at the market every day, but Rosy likes to catch her own game—says it gives her something to do and makes her feel like less of a mooch.

He’s not sure what to write about at first—he knows Rosy wants him to write about Moxie, but he doesn’t know what to say. What _is_ there to say? That he loved her? That she had mood swings? How cruel she could be?

He’s not even sure how Moxie would want to be remembered. As a good person, sure, but—she wouldn’t want Briar to gloss over the bad parts; she’d say he was doing himself a disservice by pretending like everything was fine when it wasn’t. Yeah, she’d have wanted him to feel guilty, but she herself would feel guilty for that.

But he doesn’t need to write her life story in these three hours. If Rosy’s going to have him journaling every week or more, Briar has plenty of time to start with the small stuff and work his way up.

So he starts with something innocuous—the dull shine of her hair, the scent of her soap, the beauty spots peppering her skin. He pauses, then, and adds a line about how her thighs looked: scarred and scabbed or bleeding at any given moment. She scratched and cut there because she knew nobody would see—nobody but Briar, anyway, and for reasons Briar probably won’t ever fully understand, Briar was the one person she _wanted_ to see it.

Just one time, she made a few shallow cuts on her neck—Moxie said she was practicing for the real thing. Briar painted powder onto the mess himself. It didn’t hide it, not completely, but it covered up the redness and turned the white scabs flesh-colored, even if they still didn’t blend into her skin. He told her he never wanted to see her neck look like that ever again, and she kissed him hard and told him—

What? What did she say? Briar can’t remember.

He feels like she’s slipping away from him, like one day he’s going to wake up and realize that he doesn’t remember the sound of her laugh or the feel of her skin or the content of her character. How badly she hurt him. And, fair or not, how badly _he_ hurt _her_.

When Rosy comes to find him, the journal is on the ground, and he’s crying into his hands again. “Hey,” she says, kneeling and wrapping both arms around his neck from behind. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Briar chokes out a laugh. “How can I be okay when she’ll never be okay again?”

“You will. You’ll get there.”

But Briar doesn’t believe her.

They drop everything off at their house before crossing the lawn to Mom and Dad’s. Rosy collects Mom and heads to Ash’s house posthaste, leaving Briar and Dad to stare at each other, Dad rubbing the back of his neck and grinning sheepishly. “I just put croissants in the oven right now, but they’ll be done in about twenty minutes. After that, I was going to make bagels. Sourdough. We can start the prep now; we won’t need the oven right away.”

“Okay.”

While they work, Dad keeps up a steady stream of chatter. At first, Briar can’t figure out why he’s bothering. He and Dad _never_ talk one-on-one like this; does Dad seriously think that Briar’s forgotten everything Dad did to him?. But then he realizes that Dad’s not expecting Briar to reply: he’s giving Briar something external to focus on, so that he doesn’t fall over himself depressed about Moxie. Briar tries to appreciate the thought, he does, but all he can manage to feel is angry that Dad thinks it’s okay to _speak_ to him anymore, ever.

He’s getting really, really sick of the conditioned fight-or-flight response he always has to being in Dad’s presence. It’s been like this for years, and you’d think Briar’s sympathetic nervous system would have learned to chill by now instead of keeping up the act for hours at a time, but alas. When he complains to Rosy about this after he gets back home, she just shrugs and says, “It’ll get easier over time.”

“It’s been six years since he’s shouted at me and two years since I’ve lived with him. How much more time is this supposed to take?”

“Longer, if you keep refusing to talk to him. You need to practice being around him and having it be a relaxed thing.”

They make more bagels on Tuesday, then muffins on Wednesday and simple loaves of bread of different sorts on Thursday. It’s Friday by the time Dad stops his stream of one-sided chatter and actually tries to engage Briar with questions.

“Are you doing okay, Briar?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure? I know you’re taking this hard. You’re a sensitive kid, and I know you really loved her.”

Briar wants Dad to stop talking like he knows him, like he’s got any clue what goes on in Briar’s inner world. “I’m fine,” he says instead.

“Your mother, um… Mom told us what you told her about Moxie. I’m not saying she was a bad person, but…”

Briar _wants_ to say that Dad has _no_ right to talk about who’s a bad person and who isn’t, or to make any kinds of judgments at all on the advisability of Briar’s decisions about anything in his life, especially his interpersonal relationships. But he can barely say hello to Dad, let alone tell him off for butting into things that are none of his business. Instead, he says nothing. He kneads dough and tries to breathe easier. It doesn’t work.

“Briar, please tell me what’s going through your head. Please? I just—I want to help. I know we don’t talk often, but I want to help you in any way I can.”

No reply.

“We don’t talk often,” Dad continues, “and I was hoping we could change that. I was so excited when your sister told me you’d agreed to start coming over here for afternoons. But I can’t fix anything if you don’t talk to me.”

 _Fix_ things? Doesn’t Dad know that it’s years too late for that? That he’s only here because Rosy is making him come here? Briar’s heart rate is going so fast that he’s actually feeling dizzy, winded. He turns around and rests his butt against the counter, closing his eyes. “Please stop,” he says. It’s the first time he’s asked his father for anything in—years, probably.

“Briar—”

“I can’t do this,” Briar whispers, and—oh, no. Lord, tell him he’s not about to start crying. But he feels the telltale itching of his sinuses and liquid pooling in his eyes.

“Tell me what to do,” Dad begs, and Briar begins to weep.

“Please stop,” he repeats. He sort of collapses down the counter to rest on his haunches; he sets his elbows on his knees and hides his face in his hands. “Please stop.”

“I can’t,” whispers Dad, and he sounds totally helpless. “I can’t just leave you. You’re my _child_. You’re my _baby_.”

They end up sitting side by side on the kitchen floor, Briar crying and Dad—well, Briar’s got no idea what Dad is thinking, and he doesn’t really care to find out. He’s so sick of crying that in the back of his head he’s actually starting to get more annoyed than he is sad.

“I miss you,” says Dad. “I miss having you here at home every day. I have ever since you left.”

What Briar doesn’t say is that his sister has been leagues better of a parent to him than Dad ever was, and Dad’s lost his opportunity to prove he can change. But Dad keeps talking. “I understand why you did. Leave, I mean. If I could have left my parents’ house and gotten away from my mother…?” Briar’s breath catches in his throat. Dad’s not _really_ going to go there, is he? “Of course, I did, eventually—after your mother and I won the 74th Games. I won the house you and Rosy live in now, and I moved in without bringing my family along. I missed my papa, of course, but I felt like I could finally breathe again when I was in my new home. And then came the revolution. And then they razed District 12 to the ground. My whole family, including my mom, with it.”

Briar has no idea what to say. He and Dad don’t _talk_ like this. Ever. Dad keeps going, though. “After she was dead, I thought it was my fault—that I was being punished for thinking bad thoughts about her and for wanting to get away from her. I’m not saying it’s the same with Moxie—” and a blind fury seizes control of Briar until Dad continues “—I know you loved her a great deal more than I ever loved my mother. I didn’t choose my mom, and you chose Moxie. I’m just saying, if any part of you feels—feels conflicted, or if you ever think or have thought bad thoughts about her—there’s nothing wrong with that. And—and you don’t have to let anyone treat you like that ever again. It’s okay to not be there for other people if they’re hurting you, even if they’re not doing it on purpose.”

Dad doesn’t understand at all, Briar wants to say. If he did, Dad wouldn’t be talking about Moxie; he’d be talking about himself. It’s fucking rich of him to think he can barge back into Briar’s life and tell him he’s supposed to hate the girlfriend he _loved_ who is _dead_ —!

Later that night, in the privacy of his darkened room, Briar allows himself to consider exactly why Dad’s words upset him so much. The obvious reason is that it was _Dad_ saying all that stuff, that he was either blind or a hypocrite for thinking he has any right to give Briar advice about anything shaped like abuse. But the less obvious reason—the one Briar doesn’t want to admit to—

It’s not like Briar was blameless. He never lost his temper with Moxie or shouted at her or belabored a point until it became an argument—that much was true. But Briar didn’t need to _shout_ at her to mistreat her. He was perfectly capable of doing that from the comfort of his soft-spoken voice and his calm dismissal of anything she said.

Like the whole business with Sarrel Greenscape. He only slept with her because he was hoping it would make Moxie hate him enough to want to leave him, but instead, when he told her what he’d done, she had an absolute screaming and crying meltdown, panicking about how she didn’t know what to _do_ because now she couldn’t live with _or_ without him. Rather than apologizing even once, he told her she made him do it by driving her to resent him and that her mood swings were causing her to overreact.

She routinely—she didn’t _threaten_ to kill herself, exactly, but she described her plans and complained about feeling too broken to go on—and he’d try to console her, he _would_ , but when his consolations weren’t comforting, he’d accuse her of trying to manipulate him by making empty threats designed to scare him into keeping her company. Moxie would protest that he was putting words in her mouth to make himself feel better about abandoning her. Maybe she was right about his intentions. Maybe she wasn’t. But either way, he was wrong that she was deliberately making empty threats, now that she’s gone and carried them out.

Is there a word for what it’s called when you constantly accuse someone of having manipulative intentions, whether they had them or not? Because when Moxie was happy, Briar was happy, but when she wasn’t—that was what Briar did, over and over again, to her. Maybe Briar was doing it so that _he_ could manipulate _her_ —he doesn’t know anymore; it’s all so tangled—but she killed herself all alone without even trying to ask Briar for his help, probably because she knew he’d just be dismissive of her intentions again, and that means she probably meant all the other things she said, too, that he accused her of making up to manipulate him.

That’s what he meant when he told Mom he believes her. Briar believes Moxie, but only now that it’s too late, and that’s a fuckup he can never take back.

How does he explain that to Mom or Rosy or Uncle Haymitch? How does he confess that the mistreatment wasn’t one-sided without sacrificing what they think of him, their insistence of always being on Briar’s side? Everybody’s always telling Briar that he’s sensitive, that he’s soft and kind: how does he admit that he’s a hell of a lot more hardened than any of them realize?

He could tell Dad, he realizes with a great deal of hilarity. Briar _hates_ Dad—it’s not like he cares what he thinks of him anymore, so if it ruins Dad’s image of him, then no matter. If only he could keep his heart rate level enough to initiate basic small talk with Dad, let alone bring up something as personal and cutting as this.

And then Briar realizes.

He lights a lamp, roots around in his backpack, and fishes out a pencil and some paper.

Once he’s written the letter, he sits with it in his lap, rereading it over and over and over again. It’s all in there: the way Moxie treated Briar and the way he treated her, what it was like when she was happy and what it was like when she wasn’t, how much he loved her and how much she loved him. It’s a few solid sheets long, front _and_ back, and his handwriting is tiny and cramped. He hadn’t really been serious before about giving it to Dad—not _really_ —but now that it’s out there in the world on these pages, Briar has no idea whom to give them to first, last, or not at all.

Eventually, he just folds it up a bunch of times and shoves it into the back pocket of his slacks. He’s not going to be able to brace himself to show this to anybody—the anticipation would get his heart racing and palms sweating and breathing irregular until he psyched himself out of it entirely—so he’s going to have to do it on impulse.

He carries it around with him all day Saturday, Sunday, Monday—and then realizes Monday evening that it’s fallen out of his pocket.

Shit. _Shit_. He retraces his steps since he’s been home, and the damn thing is nowhere to be seen. It has to have fallen out when he was baking with Dad at his parents’ house again, because he remembers feeling inside that pocket and making sure it was there on the walk over: where else could he have lost it? And he can’t exactly call Mom and Dad up and ask about it, because then they’ll catch on to how much anxiety is tied up in it and want to know what’s in it, and that’s _not_ a conversation he’s willing to have.

The rest of Monday passes without incident. Tuesday. Wednesday. It’s Thursday, and he’s starting to lull himself into a false sense of security, before Dad brings it up during baking hours at Mom and Dad’s house. “So, um, I found… something of yours the other day.”

Briar continues to whisk the batter in the mixing bowl until it blends. He’s probably overdoing it, and it’s probably going to turn out runny, but suddenly he doesn’t really give a damn about the pastries.

The pause seems to go on forever as Briar continues to whisk. Then, Dad says, “Briar, Moxie wasn’t a bad person. But neither are you. Even after everything, you are…”

Briar doesn’t answer.

“You did things you shouldn’t have done, and she did things she shouldn’t have done, but that’s not the entirety of who you both were. Who we are at our worst isn’t the full story. Some situations just… bring out the worst in people.”

He wonders if that’s what Dad tells himself about the way he used to treat his kids, so that he can live with himself.

“And—toxic behaviors don’t spring up into a vacuum. They have to come from somewhere. For Moxie, it probably came from her brain chemistry, and for you, it came…” Dad clears his throat, swallowing. Briar can see his throat working. “For you, it came from me.”

Still, Briar doesn’t answer. His skin is tingling all over, and he’s _sure_ that Dad can hear his heartbeat, but if he can, Dad doesn’t say anything about it.

“What… what I did to you… and what you did to Moxie sounded like two different things, but—but they came from the same place. That feeling of permission to act—out of control. I was… I was angry, all those times, and I’m not saying you were angry at Moxie. Maybe you were, I don’t know. But the way I treated you made it seem normal to say those things. The way Moxie treated you probably contributed, too. If I’m being honest with myself… you probably ended up staying with her because she reminded you of me.”

“She was nothing like you,” says Briar harshly, but that’s all he manages to get out.

“Maybe, but there’s another thing you probably learned from me, and that’s… it’s permission to be mistreated.” Briar doesn’t say anything again. “I know I don’t… Rosy told me she didn’t want to hear me apologize, so I just never…”

“I’m not Rosy,” Briar says dully.

Dad reaches over and grabs the mixing bowl and whisk. “Briar, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know it doesn’t change anything, but I am. I _need_ you to know how much I love you. I love you more than—myself. Or my life. I—”

“Please stop,” Briar whispers, screwing up his face.

Reaching into his pocket, Dad pulls out the folded-up sheets of paper and passes them to Briar, who sticks them back into his own pocket without a word. “I didn’t show it to Mom or tell anyone else about it. It’s entirely up to you who else you want to share with. I just wanted you to know that I don’t think any less of you.”

That, more than anything Dad has said all afternoon, gets Briar’s eyes leaking and sinuses burning. “I have to go,” he says, and he walks straight out of the house and doesn’t look back.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can attest that propranolol is a miracle drug, 10/10 would highly recommend.
> 
> End of the story, I think! And possibly the verse? I want to write more of this verse, but I don't know what to write about heh

That evening, Rosy comes home to discover Briar crying in a puddle on the couch. When she asks him what happened, he shoves the note at her. “Dad found this by mistake, he says.”

Rosy reads it slowly, so slowly that Briar actually sits up a little to see what’s taking so long; he thinks she actually reads it through a full two or three times before folding it back up and handing it back to him. “Briar…”

“Don’t tell me I’m not giving myself enough credit,” he says. “Every time she told me she was sad, I told her she was faking it for attention. I told her me cheating was her fault. I told her a lot of things were her fault. Rosy, I…”

“You’re right: you shouldn’t have done that,” says Rosy calmly. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t an abuser.”

“Stop calling her that!”

“Why? It’s true. An abuser is someone who commits abuse, and what she did to you definitely counts as abuse.”

“But she wasn’t… she wasn’t…” Briar impatiently brushes teardrops off his cheeks. “You say that like there was something wrong with her, like…”

Gently, Rosy says, “There _was_ something wrong with her. But you know what Dr. Aurelius would say? He would say that just because she was an abuser doesn’t mean that she was a bad person, and he would say that just because she was abusing you didn’t mean she couldn’t have done better in the future.”

“How could she be an abuser but not be a bad person?” asks Briar helplessly.

“Because ‘abuser’ is just the noun we use to describe ‘someone who abuses,’ verb. ‘Abuser’ wasn’t an innate, central, unchanging part of her identity. It’s just a descriptor for how she was acting at the time. People can act bad without _being_ bad.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does. Like—I’m gay, right? But I’ve had sex with Ash. Voluntarily.” Briar cocks his head and looks at her. “I’ve had heterosexual sex, but that doesn’t make me heterosexual, does it? It’s just something I do sometimes.”

“You and Ash have sex?”

“Not anymore, but we did on and off for… a while.” Rosy shakes her head as if to clear it. “Or—take Dad. Remember when he used to come to our elementary school and do painting demos for our classes?”

“Yeah.”

“But Dad doesn’t consider himself a teacher at the end of the day, does he? He was just doing the _act_ of teaching on certain occasions. I mean, I guess you could say that he was a teacher as in ‘someone who is teaching at this moment,’ but it wasn’t a central facet of his identity, or anything. Well, it’s just like that with Moxie. Abuse is wrong, and she was an abuser—as in was abusing you at that time—but that didn’t make her entire existence wrong, just that one thing she was doing.”

“And I suppose you’d say the same thing about Dad?” Briar asks.

He’s ready to use that talking point to explain why Rosy is wrong, but to his surprise, she smiles. “Yeah, actually, I would. I’ve talked to Dr. Aurelius about Dad, and that’s exactly what he said about him—that just like he used to teach without really being a teacher at heart, he also used to do bad things, but wasn’t a bad person.”

But Briar continues to frown. “I can give you that about Moxie, _maybe_ —that she was an abuser without being a bad person—depending on your definition of ‘abuser.’ But _Dad_? Can you really sit here and tell me that Dad’s not a bad person?”

“Briar, think about it,” says Rosy. “The things Moxie said and did to you were horrible. _Horrible_. You’re not even denying that.”

“No,” he says softly.

“Right. But she still had redeeming qualities, didn’t she? I mean, you must have loved her for some reason.”

“She cared deeply about people,” says Briar. “She cared about me—she defended me when I got picked on—and she used to cry after school if she heard that someone’s grandparent had just died or that someone else was out of school because they were sick. She even cared about people she’d never met—she followed the news about other districts and their problems and always wanted to, you know, donate her whole allowance from her parents to charities. Everybody else at school always self-segregated according to whether their parents were Seam or merchant class before the revolution, but even though Moxie’s parents had been merchant class, she made a point of hanging out with the Seam kids, and she’d yell at merchant kids she saw making fun of Seam kids. And she always listened to your problems no matter how long it took you to talk about them. And…”

“And what?”

“And she felt guilty. When she was herself, she felt really, really guilty for the things she said when she wasn’t herself. I know it would have been better for her to have learned how to change, but—if she were just some sociopath, she wouldn’t have cared.”

“Okay. Now do that for Dad. What are some things Dad is or does that make him good?”

Briar starts to protest, “But—”

“I’m not saying it negates the bad stuff,” says Rosy softly. “But, remember, it doesn’t negate the bad stuff for Moxie, either. Moxie was an abuser who cared deeply about people, and Dad was an abuser who…?”

He takes a minute to think about it. Then another. “When he isn’t being—a monster—he can be very… considerate. He’s always doing all the housework because he doesn’t want Mom to feel like she has to. He taught you how to draw, and you always said you enjoyed learning from him because he was patient with you and asked you what things _you_ wanted to learn about. He’s always asking us about our lives and wants to know what’s going on in them. But every time he—”

“No ‘buts,’” she says sharply. “What else?”

“I mean… I guess there was what he did after he was hijacked. Mom scared the hell out of him for a long time, but because he loved her, he went along with the reverse hijacking using morphling that they set him up with. And he sleeps cuffed to the bed every night because, the one time a year he has a nightmare about Mom, he doesn’t want to risk hurting her.”

“Good. That’s another. Any others?”

“He… he… there’s his businesses. The bakery and his art commissions. He does everything for free because he wants to help people.”

“Good. That’s really good, Briar. See? Even Dad can be okay sometimes.”

He feels like he’s going to burst with the injustice of it all. “But that doesn’t change the fact that he—”

“I never said it did. They coexist. He does good things, and he’s done terrible, awful— _reprehensible_ things. Those things are _both_ true—about Dad, and about Moxie, too.”

Briar doesn’t answer her, and she sighs. They sit there in silence for a minute together, and then finally Rosy asks, “What did Dad say about the note you wrote?”

“He said neither of us is a bad person, even though we were bad for each other. He said he was sorry. He said I learned abuse from him, and he said I learned to give other people permission to abuse me from him, too. He said Moxie probably reminded me of him. But she didn’t! I swear to god, Rosy, I—”

“I believe you,” she says. “But it sounds like the rest of it was probably true. Especially the part about him being sorry. I used to hate the way he talked about that all the time.”

“Why would you hate it?” Briar asks.

“I hated it because it was something he said to make himself feel better about what he was doing, and it was something he said so many times that he taught me it was normal to accept his apologies and let him keep doing the same thing wrong over and over.”

He twists his lips. “I never thought of it that way. I always just thought it meant he felt guilty, and he owed it to me to feel guilty.”

“Briar, I think our dad has more guilt on his shoulders than some people experience cumulatively in their lifetimes, and I think that no matter what he does to try to make it up to us, that’s never going to change. Honestly, it’s one of his most redeeming qualities.”

Briar thinks on that all night—that his dad has goodness, and some of it comes from his guilt. Didn’t Briar always think that Moxie’s guilt made up for the way she treated him? So why shouldn’t his dad’s?

Because Dad _hurt_ him, was the easy answer. But Moxie hurt him, too—in some ways, worse than Dad did. If he could still love her in spite of it, why doesn’t he love Dad?

When he goes back over to Dad’s the following afternoon, he doesn’t really know whether or not he wants to talk to Dad further about it. A huge part of him wants to hide and not even go over there or, if he _has_ to go, to avoid the hell out of any personal subjects until he’s able to scamper home. But another part—an increasingly vocal part—wants to confront Dad, to beat him down until the guilt overwhelms him.

When Dad opens the door, he looks haggard and frazzled. “Briar,” he says, and his voice sounds scratchy. He clears his throat and tries again. “Hey.”

“Hey.” They stare at each other across the doorway for a second, and then Dad steps back and Briar goes into the house. There’s a big pause, and then Briar says, “Look, Dad—” at the same time as _Dad_ says, “I just wanted—”

They both stop talking abruptly, and then Dad gives a nervous little laugh. It occurs to Briar that Dad might be feeling as apprehensive about this conversation as Briar is. “You first,” he tells Dad.

“I just wanted to say that I shouldn’t have read the letter,” he says slowly. “I opened it to see what it was—if it was trash or what—but when I realized that your private thoughts were on those papers, I should have folded them back up and called you right away to give them back. I don’t know if it helps, but the reason I kept reading was that—well, you scared your mother and me a little with what you had told her, and I needed to know how badly hurt you were. I knew I couldn’t do anything to change it, but I needed—or thought I needed—to know what was wrong so that I could try to find a way to fix it. But it wasn’t my place, and I’m sorry if my reading it hurt you.”

It sounds like Dad rehearsed this whole thing, and Briar wonders if he wasn’t the only one who was up late thinking last night, looking again at the pallor of Dad’s face. “Right. Um, thanks,” he says, not sure what else to tell him.

“Your turn,” says Dad with a ghost of a smile.

“I…” Briar doesn’t really know where to start. How do you call your father out on twelve years of emotional torment when you haven’t really had a real conversation with him in half that long? “I hate you.”

Well, that’s not what he was planning to say: it just sort of pops out before Briar can really think it through. After a lifetime of bottling up his true feelings around his father, it feels liberating and terrifying all at once. Dad’s face falls.

“I didn’t always hate you,” he goes on. “When I was a little kid, I remember wanting your approval. And you gave me it, sometimes. When you weren’t mad at me, you told me I was—you told me I was your sweet, sensitive boy, and that you loved me, and that you were going to take care of me. But then you’d get mad, and I started just—counting down the days until you got mad. It didn’t matter what I did: I always did something wrong to make you angry eventually. And I thought it was _me_ that was making you mad. I tried so hard to please you, but it never worked. I tried to hide from you, but that didn’t work, either. And then I realized that I _couldn’t_. I couldn’t please you. You couldn’t be pleased. So I hated you. I hated you so that, even if you kept hurting me, you couldn’t let me down.

“And I just—Grandma Mellark was even worse to you, you made that abundantly clear, and I just want to know—how could you?” Briar’s voice breaks. “How could you _remember_ what it felt like to be a scared little kid who couldn’t do the right thing to make it stop, and then turn around and make me feel the same way?”

Dad’s chin is wobbling, and his eyes are haunted and shining. They’re still standing there awkwardly in the foyer, and Briar takes a step back so he can lean backward against the door. He rubs his hands down his face and is surprised to feel them come away wet.

“Are you sure you want to know?” asks Dad, his voice surprisingly steady. “Is that really something you want to hear? Because I don’t want to make excuses, and—”

“I want to know what could possess a _good, kind_ person who claims to love his child to tell that child that he’s—a pussy, or a runt, or weak, or broken, or—”

Briar’s voice is getting louder and louder, and Dad’s hand flies to his mouth, at first covering it, until he stuffs his whole fist in his mouth and kind of chokes around it.

“I want to know,” says Briar quietly. “I want to know how you could do this to me.”

Dad lowers his fist and lets out a whooshing breath. “It’s a sort of… frustration,” he says carefully. “It’s—when I was a kid…”

He stops talking, then abruptly turns around and starts walking deeper into the house. Briar follows him into the living room, where Dad seats himself on the couch. Briar ignores the empty space next to him and grabs an armchair instead.

“When I was a kid,” Dad continues, sounding a little more sure of himself, “my mom was always angry, and my papa was never angry. I thought that—I thought that anger was something only bad people felt, because my mom was bad and my papa was good, and because my mom made me mad sometimes, I thought _I_ must be bad, too. And then—then I had Rosy and you. And kids, they do things that frustrate you, and when _you_ would frustrate me…”

Briar leans forward in his seat. It’s a side of his dad that Briar has never heard about, and he’s fascinated and scared at the same time. “I tried to shove the anger down, to be like my papa and not ever express it, but it wouldn’t go away, and it kept building up and building up until finally one of you two would do something and I would… and you wouldn’t fight back. Rosy fought back, and we’d get sucked into screaming at each other, and it felt like a sort of catharsis. But you wouldn’t. And it made me so _mad_ that you had angered me and then wouldn’t even give me a—it was like you just wanted to avoid the conflict altogether, like you deserved to be punished for doing something wrong and you wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of—like you were evading responsibility, because it was like talking to a blank wall. At least Rosy fought back and there was satisfaction in that, but you—I wanted to see you hurting, and you never let me, and I hated that.”

Briar’s head is spinning. He pulls his feet up onto the chair. “How could you look at a _child_ who was terrified of you and want them to _hurt_? How could you find satisfaction in screaming insults at a _child_?”

“I wish I didn’t,” Dad whispers. A tear spills down his cheek, then another. “If I were a better person, I wouldn’t have. I can’t defend myself—I can’t…”

“Because I wasn’t _satisfied_. I didn’t want it. I just wanted to be safe and loved. The things you said—they weren’t a joke to me; they were real. I believed them. You called me weak, and I believed you. You said you were going to send me away, and I believed you. You said no one would ever love me, and I believed you. And then—and then… and then you said you loved me, and you were sorry, and it didn’t mean you didn’t care about me, and _I believed you_. Do you know how confusing that was? How damaging?”

“I know,” croaks Dad. “Briar…”

“You know, Moxie may have been a psychopath, but at least I wasn’t powerless with her. At least when she told me I didn’t deserve to be happy, I didn’t _believe_ her. Not like I believed you. At least I could—I could hurt her back. I could accuse her of making it all up to manipulate me, and I knew that I was causing her pain by not believing her. But you? You hurt me when I couldn’t _touch_ you. You will _always_ have one up on me. You wonder why I don’t confide in you, why we don’t have a relationship? You had your chance, and you fucked it up.

“You know I’m eighteen years old, and I’m _still_ scared of you? You want to know how fast my pulse goes every time I’m in a room with you? Saying all this, I honestly feel like I’m going to black out at any second. I’m not Rosy. I can’t just cry it out with you one time and suddenly let you back into my life. I’m gone. I’m done. I never want to see you ever, ever again. Shut _up_ ,” he adds when Dad starts making little choking noises as he cries. “I don’t want to hear you. You don’t get that luxury.”

The ringing silence drags on for moment after moment. Dad is sobbing silently now, and Briar has half a mind to walk out and leave Dad to cry alone, but he wants to watch Dad suffer.

It feels good, but only a little. He’d have thought it would be more satisfying than this to reduce Dad to tears.

As they sit there, Dad crying and Briar watching, he thinks about Moxie, and he thinks he’s got it figured out. He doesn’t hate Moxie because—even at her most monstrous and cruel and abusive—he didn’t feel like Moxie was abusing her power over him. Moxie didn’t _have_ power over him to abuse. Not like Dad did. Dad, on the other hand, was his parent, and he didn’t just abuse Briar: he abused his authority. Moxie said awful things, and they unsettled him, and he sometimes even believed them, but he knew he had chosen to be with her, and he could leave her. (He could. His attempts to leave didn’t last, because he felt guilted into coming back, but just because he felt guilty didn’t mean he felt powerless—even if it was just the illusion of choice.) But he could never just choose to leave Dad.

At least—not until now.

He wonders how family night is going to work from now on. Will Briar just be uninvited, now? That would be awkward, since Rosy has it at their house. Will Rosy move it to Mom and Dad’s, or to the Wheatshires’? Will they maybe trade off weeks—Briar attending one week and Mom and Dad the next? Will they have two mini family nights every week, one with Briar and one with Mom and Dad?

The more he thinks about it, the more it makes him sad—overpoweringly sad. If this is the end of Briar and Dad, then it’s also the breaking up of their family. Is he going to lose Mom, too? Does he care? She enabled Dad all those years—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Briar wants to give up half his family. Rosy has always done the decent thing with Briar, and he doesn’t want to cut ties with her, too—but in order to break with Dad, is he going to have to break with everyone Dad is close to? What about Uncle Haymitch? What is he supposed to tell Daphne?

And then Briar allows himself to consider the notion of letting Dad—stay in his life. Not in a huge way. Not in a close relationship. Sort of like before, when they rarely saw each other, but without all the—sweat and pulse and adrenaline.

Is it even possible for Briar to condition away his fear of his father? In order to do so, is he going to _have_ to get closer to him, at least a little?

Eventually, when Dad has stopped crying and is just sitting there watching Briar apprehensively, Briar says, “What happens now?”

“Well,” says Dad, “that depends on what you want to do. I think we both know that we can’t keep going along like we have been.”

Briar pauses. “What do _you_ want from _me_ , anyway?”

“If I get to pick?” Dad asks, and he nods. “I want to be in your life. I want to teach you that you can trust me, over time, and I want you to—to learn that it’s still possible for you to love me.”

“Why?”

“Because… there’s something fundamental about loving your child and wanting to be there for them.”

“Even though you wanted to make us suffer.”

“Even though… I wanted to make you suffer,” Dad trails off, looking lost.

Briar doesn’t know what to think. He wishes, for a fleeting moment, that he didn’t have a father at all, so that he wouldn’t have to decide what to do about him. “I think… I want to be able to get used to being in a room with you, if only because it would be inconvenient to try to avoid you entirely. I’m sick of feeling like I’m having a panic attack every time you come near.”

Dad nods intently, even though he still looks pained. “The healer’s office might be able to help with that, actually. There’s a drug I used to take sometimes to stop me from—I mean, it stopped my pulse from rising and blocked other… symptoms… when I was around your mother. They used to give it to me when we lived in District 13.”

“Morphling?”

“No, not morphling. It was a beta blocker… propranolol, I think it was called? They started me on a sort of high dose of it, and by the time they stopped giving it to me, she no longer made me anxious.” Briar frowns again. “It was like—the medicine only blocked the physiological symptoms, but it sort of indirectly stopped my mental anxiety from escalating, too. You know how you notice your body reacting and it makes you even more anxious? It stopped that feedback loop.”

“That sounds too good to be true.”

Dad smiles. “Never underestimate the miracle of modern medicine.”

Briar thinks on it for a few moments. “It’s worth a shot, I guess,” he finally relents. He can hardly believe that he’s sitting in Dad’s living room talking with him about how anxious Dad makes him feel. As he generally does when the anxiety is particularly bad, he feels like his heart is going to break straight free of his chest if it keeps pounding like this any longer. “But I’m doing it for my benefit, not yours.”

“I understand,” says Dad. He sounds defeated and broken and—resigned. “I’ll try not to drop by unexpectedly from now on,” he adds with a wry smile. “If you leave now, you can probably drop by before they close for the weekend.”

Since he’s eighteen now, he doesn’t need a parent or Rosy to accompany him to the healer, Mrs. Thornesmith’s, office. Briar doesn’t feel comfortable laying out the whole story when he knows the whole town loves his dad, so he just says that he’s been prone to bursts of anxiety lately when he gets to thinking about Moxie’s suicide as he’s trying to fall asleep, and that Dad had found propranolol helpful before and suggested it. “Propranolol is an old one, but it’s held up over time,” says Mrs. Thornesmith, clucking her tongue. “Take it about an hour before bed, if that’s when you’re experiencing symptoms, because it can take up to that long to kick in. I’m guessing you won’t be doing any exercising after you take it, but, well—don’t. Since it prevents your heart rate from elevating, that can be dangerous.”

She fills the script for him, and he tips her generously. He’s—sort of looking forward to trying it at family night on Sunday. He’s _not_ , of course, because that means being around Dad, and he _hates_ being around Dad—but if he’s going to have to be around Dad anyway, he’s almost excited to find out just effective the little orange pills are.

The answer: highly effective. He still feels a _tiny_ bit flushed on the inside, but his cheeks aren’t burning like they normally do. He’s not sweating. His pulse is maybe a little faster than normal, but it feels sort of—muted? Like, it’s not beating hard or loudly anymore, almost like somebody put some kind of dampener on it. His breathing is slow and steady. And he doesn’t feel like he constantly needs to pee.

Even sitting right next to Dad at the table, Briar is able to relax a little and actually sort of enjoy talking to Rosy and Ash and Haymitch. “Well, someone’s chatty tonight,” says Haymitch, looking both pleased and confused, and Briar just grins at him and shakes his head.

He sees what Dad meant about the drug sort of intercepting the physiological-mental cycle of rising anxiety. He’s still _anxious_ , don’t get him wrong—still doesn’t really want to be here and wishes that Dad weren’t around—but the worry that he’s going to be _found out_ as being anxious is gone, and the anticipation of something bad happening is more muted, now, too.

When he tells Rosy about the propranolol, she smiles at him. “I thought you seemed different tonight. That’s great, Briar. Does this mean…? I mean, I thought you wanted Dad completely out of your life. Are you…?”

“I don’t know,” says Briar truthfully. “I don’t know what happens next. If I could flip a switch and never have to see him again with no inconvenience to myself, I would, but since that’s not an option—I don’t know what I want.”

Weeks pass, and Briar adjusts to the new normal of not being quite so anxious around Dad. No: that’s not right. He doesn’t adjust to it—he continues to marvel at it, never taking it for granted. But he does sort of start to get used to it.

He never really had _friends_ at school—he was all alone, really, until he started seeing Moxie—and he’s not particularly interested in getting to know new people, so he starts spending more time with the people he’s already got. He visits Haymitch three times a week—although he doesn’t try drinking with him again—and makes sure that he’s always invited to family night. He goes hunting with Rosy and helps her cook. He even starts going with Rosy every once in a while to visit Ash and Daphne.

His teachers start giving him the coursework he needs to make up, and he spends his days sitting deep in the woods and studying. He still misses Moxie, but he thinks he understands her better now than he ever did when she was alive. She was troubled. She was sick. She was, yes, abusive. And she’s probably in a better place now, or so Briar hopes. Certainly his own life has improved now that she’s not in it anymore, and while he feels guilty about that, he reminds himself that just because he’s better off with her _gone_ doesn’t mean he ever wished her _dead_.

And then, somewhere along the line, he starts seeing Moxie and Dad as being connected. Like if he can accept that Moxie was a good person who did horrible things, then he can accept the same about Dad. Like if he can look past all that and forgive Moxie, then maybe he can forgive Dad, too.

It’s almost like—black-and-white thinking? Like he cast Dad into the “bad” pile and Moxie into the “good” pile no matter how many good things Dad did or how many bad things Moxie did. But maybe they belonged in the same pile all along. Maybe people aren’t saints or monsters; they’re just people. Maybe Rosy was right, and forgiveness isn’t about _them_ , it’s about you.

He knows that Dad is dying to have a real relationship with him, and he knows he might never be capable of that—and that’s okay. But maybe Briar can still make his peace with Dad from afar.

It’s family night one evening in August when Rosy announces to the table that Briar has passed all his classes and graduated. As Haymitch thumps him on the back, she brings out a cake that has been layered in icing which reads _CONGRATULATIONS GRADUATE_ in what is unmistakably Dad’s writing. “Thank you,” says Briar, but he’s looking beside himself at Dad, and Dad is looking back at him.

“I have one more announcement,” she says after everybody has taken a slice of cake. “Ash and I have been talking for a while about adoption, and, well—we’ve been approved. Ash is bringing home a new baby girl from District 11 next month.”

“Hey-hey!” roars Haymitch delightedly. Dad congratulates Rosy and Ash, and Mom just covers her mouth with her hand looking like she might cry from happiness.

Briar leans to his right and wraps his arms around Rosy, resting his head on her shoulder. “You’re such a good mom,” he says quietly. He knows Rosy doesn’t agree—that she’s afraid of doing to Daphne and now the new baby what Dad did to them—but the thing is, Rosy had the strength to walk away rather than risk the happiness of her child. Dad couldn’t do that. Even Mom couldn’t do that—wouldn’t take them and go when she realized what Dad was becoming.

Mom and Dad are the last to leave. Briar gives Mom a hug and then, instead of nodding at Dad without looking into his eyes, steps forward and kisses Dad on the cheek. “Bye, Dad,” he says, and Dad’s face lights up like it’s Christmas.

“Bye, son,” he says, and then he and Mom are gone.

It’s not until hours later that Briar realizes he had forgotten to take his propranolol tonight. His pulse beats steady, and he smiles.


End file.
